Searching for a critical thinking: e-portfolio and town planning

Abstract

Every intervention on urban environments -and in the city in general terms- requires, besides the specific capacity to read and understand it, the ability to find the proper answer. That is to say, the intervention necessarily implies both, a subjective interpretation and a personal contribution of the architect in the design. Enhance the creative capacity of students to intervene on the complexity of the city requires new learning methodologies implemented in the workshop that, by improving significantly the capacity of their critical reasoning, will increase their skills for solving eventual problems that they will have to face up in the future. This paper, aims to show a specific implementation of a new effective teaching strategy, by combining workshop tasks and the e-Portfolio elaboration, in order to ensure that students acquire specific and transversal competences needed to address an urban project with a sufficient cognitive and instrumental background to undertake the urban complexity. Evaluate their results should allow, at the same time, enhance such initiatives and learning techniques.